[NCLUG] Re: DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[Grant Johnson]

> What do you mean by shared-access? My understanding is that cable is shared
> and that if a lot of people in your area are online you will see a decrease
> in performance. By contrast, DSL gives you a dedicated line to a point -
> usually a junction box. The further to box the slower your connection can
> be. As a result, you should not see changes in speed based on how many
> people in your area are online. There may be other issues that affect speed
> but my understanding was that it's not shared the same way as cable is.
>
>
>   

This is a partial truth, in order to make them look good.

There is a dedicated line, from you to the CO (the little rack of 
switching equipment) from there , it is shared.


The line on cable is shared all of the way to the house, but the low 
bandwidth part (47 Mbps) is only from the node to the house.  Upstream 
of that it is high bandwidth fiber, back to the head end, which is the 
same thing logically as the CO.  

So, unless you congestion is in the last mile, which is impossible in 
DSL land, or highly unlikely in cable land (they have to keep fairly few 
people per node to handle VOD) the real issue is their upstream from the 
switching building to the backbone.   Same problem with both.   It 
really depends on how good your provider is, not whether it is cable or DSL.